Nikhil
From Wiki
WEEK1
We started this course with a glance at various kinds of pollutants. The over arching idea being to analyze levels of various pollutants and bringing them out into the open through some form of a poetic interpretation. The aim is to take this a step further and use it as a means to convince policy makers of the state to do something about the levels of contamination that we are being exposed to everyday.
analyze? poetic interpretation?? ...how? (simple drawing, not so simple actually.)
The rest of the week was mainly spent getting back into processing. doing the LED blink program on arduino, etc. We have been given some interesting references to look up, Pauline Oliveros, Murray Schaffer to name some. still getting the hang of all this code etc... iv forgotten a lot. its been a good year or two since i last tinkered with this stuff.
WEEK2
Our introduction to Victor's highly inspiring "in the air" project. I just cant get over the time lapse video of the city "breathing". That is just beautiful. heres the link for it: www.intheair.es also glob@sintheair is an interesting project on the same lines. Got to talk to victor about some of the pros and cons of visual node based programming languages vs the usual syntax based processing and C++ type languages. I realized that node based visual languages are easier to pick up and far less intimidating at first. However, i learned that, at more complex stages of programming these can be highly complex and almost fractal like! Anyway, syntax is just something that i have a problem with...seriously.
Got hold of some really cool sensors. most of which are available on www.sparkfun.com so we hooked them up to our arduino boards and figured out how they work. The readings that most of the sensors gave out were pretty glitchy at first, but the trick is to pick out a range and somehow ignore the tiny spikes in the readings. Personally found the bend sensor very interesting. its got loads of scope for application: hinges of doors and windows, containers, joints in the human body, etc... i wanted to do a mj move sensor. something that makes one of those mj sound effects when you get into a mj dance position... maybe multiple ones which work when bent in the right combination.
WEEK3
This week we were introduced to theramin and a few other cool musical instruments that use non conventional way of creating sound. Mark took us through the various elements that are involved in creating music. Power, sound generator, clock, sequencer, amplification, speakers and a HMI (Human machine interface using sensors) allow us to control and create music (or noise) from the sounds produced.
We also learned about electrical circuits and terms and symbols used in the process of designing a circuit. Connected speakers to the battery and created an interface, making circuits using a breadboard. Also explained the logic behind a NAND gate, using LDR, Potentiometer (also known as "potty" with love)
Tried making our machines into servers using WAMP. Always wanted to host my own website but its quite pointless considering the kind of power cuts that go on around yelahanka. Next step was to create a blog using wordpress and host it from my computer. too many issues i came across, decided to scrap it.
Spent the rest of the week fiddling with a whole bunch of different sensors - LDRs flex resistors, etc... really cool stuff, still cant get over Mark's music box!
Potty Party Got to do a lil DIY thing with Mark. Some samosas, sum pepsi, and a whole lot of noise. a perfect evening. Basically what we did at this workshop was build a lil gadget that creates noise based on the NAND gates logical operators. using a LDR we could also change the intensity of the signal using a torch. Last step was to give it a speaker input. This whole thing was loads of fun.
Introduction to Pachube Pachube is a site where one can upload any sort of data feed live. it uses google maps to pin point the location of these feeds. This would later feed into the projects that we will get into. It will be useful to send pollution levels that the sensor picks up and transmit it to the the computer running the program.
DIY Microscope
This was just crazy, i mean who would think that you could make your own microscope by just flipping the lens around! Sounds absurd... but it actually works. Mark was using Pure Data to edit the image that the microscope was sending to his machine. I tried doing the same, but the webcam i was using wasnt compatible with my Mac. If i could get my mac to recognize this webcam i could use Quartz Composer to do sumthing similar to what Mark was doing using PD. The image could be filtered using various filters native to QC.
WEEK4
Took a looooooooong walk down to the Yelahanka Kere to collect samples for our microscope experiment. picked up some interesting things, but i was expecting to see some serious life under that microscope, instead we were left with just a whole bunch of dirt and algae that we were wading through under the lens. Fun none the less.
Went home and really went crazy with my microscope. Used deodrant, set the slide on fire, burnt hair on it, tried everything with whatever was around me. Through out the week i was working on this video that used footage i recorded from my microscope. Since im majorly bent towards typography i wanted to somehow incorporate that as well. So I faked some microscope looking scenes using After Effects. Once i had all my video clips ready, i dumped them on VDMX (a live video editing software) and live mixed them to an audio track. heres the link: [1] its nothing great, but i know this is a possibility in the future for something more concrete.
WEEK5
